The short answer
Reddit's consensus on fake-stream and bot-based playlist promotion is unanimous: it's a scam, and it can get your track flagged for artificial streaming even if you never bought the bots yourself. On paid pitching services that connect artists with real curators, the reviews genuinely split, and the deciding factor is almost always whether the company shows you the specific playlist before and after you pay, not whether 'playlist promotion' as a category works.
Somebody on the Spotify Community forums described the scam better than most marketing copy ever will. A "playlist company" adds songs from thousands of artists a day to one giant playlist, pumps bot streams and sometimes fake followers into it, and waits for the spike in Spotify for Artists to make the artist panic and pay for more. That's not a fringe complaint. It's the most upvoted explanation on threads like Stop Playlist Scams, and it matches what we see from artists who come to us after getting burned elsewhere.
Here's the part that should bother you more than the money. A separate Community thread, Artists Spotify promotion service scams, describes companies adding songs to these playlists without the artist's permission at all. Someone else's bot farm decides to dump your track into a junk playlist, Spotify flags the artificial streaming, and you're the one dealing with a pulled song or a flagged account. You didn't buy anything. You still got burned.
I run campaigns for a living, so I've read more of these threads than is probably healthy. There's a real split in how Reddit and the Spotify Community talk about this, and it's not the split people assume.
The part nobody actually disagrees on
Bot streams and fake followers get trashed everywhere, consistently, with zero defenders. I agree with that completely. We talk to artists every week who got a "guaranteed 50k streams" package for twenty bucks, and the pattern never changes: a spike overnight, then a cliff, or a track flagged within weeks. If a service won't name the specific playlists your song is landing on before you pay, that's not promotion. It's a stream farm wearing a playlist as a costume.
This is the one place where the internet's skepticism of this industry is fully earned. We've written about the mechanics of this before, including why free submission tools carry their own quiet risk that nobody prices in until it's too late.
Where the real disagreement lives: paid pitching to actual curators
This is the part people flatten into "Reddit hates playlist promotion," and that's not accurate. There's a real difference between a service that bots streams and one that pitches your track to a human curator who can say no. On that second category, opinion is genuinely mixed.
Fortune's reporting on Playlist Push, one of the older and more established pitching platforms, caught this split in one article. Founder George Goodrich told Fortune the company had run more than 1,200 campaigns at that point, with artists getting added to an average of 12 to 15 playlists each. In the same piece, a different artist's experience landed nowhere near that:
Altogether, [the artist] saw little to no movement on his Spotify streaming numbers.
His own summary after a redo campaign was blunt, and honestly the most useful sentence in the whole article: "A lot of people say these guys are scamming artists. It's a crooked industry. I would stress you're really paying to use software to connect with curators. That's kind of all there is to it. I see it as neutral at this point."
Fortune also pulled a comment straight from a r/WeAreTheMusicMakers thread to show the temperature: "DONT [sic] USE PLAYLIST PUSH. THEY RIPPED ME OFF. $300 down the drain." That's a real comment from a real subreddit, and it's the exact energy you'll find if you go looking yourself. We went deeper on this specific company in our Playlist Push review, because the $250 question deserves more than one anecdote on either side.
"Neutral at this point" is, I think, the most honest take available. Pitching software connects you to curators who can say no. Some campaigns land, some don't, and the variance between individual tracks and individual curators is enormous. That's unsatisfying as a Reddit comment. It's accurate anyway.
Other reviewers tell a better story with different companies. Two Story Melody's trial of a different playlist-promotion service produced 23 placements that drove 62,939 streams at a cost per stream of roughly a penny. That's a genuinely good outcome, and review sites for other services tell the opposite story in the same week. People are describing different companies and lumping it all under one label.
How to tell a real placement from a botted one
A few honest markers, based on what we check before accepting a campaign ourselves.
| Signal | Legit placement | Botted or fake service |
|---|---|---|
| Before you pay | Named curators or playlist categories, sample playlists you can inspect | Vague promise of "100k+ reach" with no specific playlists shown |
| Stream pattern | Gradual increase that tracks with playlist traffic | Sudden overnight spike, then a cliff |
| Playlist content | Genre-coherent tracklist, regularly updated | Hundreds of unrelated tracks, rarely touched after artists pay to be added |
| Risk to your account | Low, since real listeners generate the streams | Real risk of track removal or account flags for artificial streaming |
| Reporting after the fact | Shows which playlists you landed on, with links | No proof, or links that don't resolve to a real playlist |
One tell is subtle but telling. Even companies trying to stay above board are now warning customers directly about detection risk. One promotion company's own reply to a negative Trustpilot review admitted that "sudden or large increases in streams (especially on new tracks with little prior activity) can sometimes trigger automatic removals," regardless of intent. If the people selling you the service are telling you to go slow so Spotify doesn't notice, that tells you something about what they're selling.
Where I think Reddit is stuck a few years back
Reddit is right about the bots. Full stop, no caveat. If a service can't show you a real playlist with a real follower count and recent activity before you take out your card, walk away.
Where the conversation gets outdated is treating "paid playlist promotion" as one thing to approve or reject wholesale. It isn't. There's a wide gap between a twenty-dollar Fiverr gig promising 50,000 plays and a campaign pitching a genre-specific track to curators running active, niche playlists. The marketing language sounds identical for both, which is exactly why they get lumped together, and why good advice gets buried under blanket distrust.
We've run 2,464 campaigns for 2,213 artists since 2019, and made 14,632 playlist placements total, with 5,505 still active right now, mostly across Rap/Hip-Hop, Afrobeats, Pop, Dance/House, and R&B/Soul. The honest answer to "does this work" isn't yes or no. It's that it depends on fit, not hype. The campaigns that disappoint are almost never scams. They're genre mismatches, a track pitched to playlists where it never belonged in the first place. That's a less exciting story than "it's all fake" or "it's all magic," but it's the real one, and it's the same reason curators reject most of what lands in their inbox regardless of quality.
If your track keeps getting turned down, the problem usually isn't the song. We've written about why curators reject nine out of ten submissions, and fit explains most of it.
If you want help getting in front of real curators once a track is ready, our campaigns are built around the exact transparency Reddit keeps asking for: real playlists, genre fit, no bots. Reddit's distrust of this industry is healthy. Most of the industry earned it. Just don't let that instinct talk you out of the placements that are actually real.
Common questions
Is Spotify playlist promotion worth it according to Reddit?
Reddit is split, and for good reason. Some artists report real placements and a legitimate streaming bump from paid pitching services, while others say they paid and got nothing or landed on low-quality playlists. The pattern across threads is that results depend on which specific company you use, not on whether playlist pitching works as a category.
Why are Spotify artists on Reddit so against bought streams and bots?
Because Spotify detects and penalizes artificial streaming, and artists have had songs pulled or accounts flagged even when they didn't knowingly buy bots. Bad actors sometimes add other artists' songs to botted playlists without permission, which gets those tracks flagged by association.
What's the difference between a legit playlist placement and a fake one?
A legit placement comes from a real curator listening to your track and choosing to add it, with transparent reporting on exactly which playlist you landed on. A fake one usually involves a playlist stuffed with thousands of unrelated tracks and inflated with bot streams, built to look impressive rather than to be listened to.
Does Spotify have an official playlist promotion service?
No. Spotify doesn't sell playlist placement directly to artists, which is exactly why a crowded market of third-party pitching services, some legitimate and some not, exists to fill that gap.
What genres get the most value from paid playlist campaigns?
In our own campaign data at PlaylistGrow, Rap/Hip-Hop, Afrobeats, Pop, Dance/House, and R&B/Soul are the genres we place most often. Those genres tend to have the deepest pool of active, niche playlists with real listener bases behind them.
Sources & discussions referenced
Artist Growth Lead at PlaylistGrow
Runs artist campaigns at PlaylistGrow. Has watched more Spotify for Artists dashboards than anyone should, and writes about what actually moves streams.
